Ever since midway through the primaries, I've been on a one-man, losing campaign to get Josh Marshall to stop publishing, with banner headlines, every political poll press release that crosses the virtual desk over at TPM.
It’s maddening. TPM is a great site; but, like the Democrats in Congress, even your best friends can unwittingly play into the hand of the enemy camp.
Two days ago, HuffPost ran a terrific article pointing out how all of the national polls which purported to show McCain pulling even with Obama this week did so by changing their survey samples to include more Republicans and fewer democrats. (Poll Madness: McCain Takes Lead Even As Democrats Out-Register Republicans?)
But the mainstream media, both print and broadcast, simply reported the questionable polling numbers as gospel—thus helping Karl Rove and John McCain create a spurious bandwagon effect.
This whole thing reminds me of a story I learned in a class at Penn State: that Lenin, arriving in Moscow with a small group of followers, named his group the 'Bolsheviks', which translates to something like 'the majority party'. The uneducated, rural population streaming into the cities looking for work, hoping to align themselves with a group that could help them, gravitated to the name, and it became a self-fulfilling reality.
Similarly, almost ANYTHING with a bunch of numbers attached to it gets treated as gospel truth by one (very large) section of the Fourth Estate, in the same way that Doctors' advice is often accepted without question. Innumerate or time-starved (or both) reporters can't understand it, but rather than do their homework they just assume that the subject is over their heads. They figure that the guy who said it must be awfully smart because, well, it's all so numbery! So they assume that it's true—and hope for the best. And in so doing, they assist in bringing about the worst
That’s what passes for critical thinking in mainstream journalism today. And now that this pattern has manifested itself, you can be sure that the Roves of this world will be utterly amoral about exploiting it as a mob-controlling political tool.
That’s one of Rove’s founding principles: if enough people think McCain is winning – even though he’s not – then they’ll just go along with the herd because they’re sheep. Another is that if you tell enough lies fast enough, nobody can ever catch up with the refutations, and the lies will take over as the popular version of reality. A corollary is, the bigger the lie, the more the commercial media will play it up, and the less they’ll question it.
Goebbels is alive and well in the Republican campaign.
So thank heaven for DailyKos and HuffPost—and if Josh Marshall shapes up in his handling of polls, we’d be happy to include him in that blessed category as well. As for the pollsters, maybe we need to begin looking at where their money comes from.